Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting - PI Buzz

Public records researchers know that the online court case index for any one county may not be as reliable as the one maintained at the courthouse. BRBPub reports that as much as 15 percent of counties have inaccuracies.

Some of the typical shortcomings noted for the online search of court records include missing cases, incorrect/missing IDs, wrong charge codes, missing dispositions, lack of sentence details, and missing probation updates/violations. The date range of online records online is often much shorter compared to searching in-person.

BRBpub has added a feature for subscribers to its Public Records Retriever Network — a nationwide directory of companies that search onsite government public records — that displays a warning when there is a discrepancy between the online database and the onsite index. Their caution for Hennepin County, Minnesota reads:

The online system for court records is incomplete. The federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) prevents the state from displaying harassment and domestic abuse case records online, but these convictions are available at the courthouse. Comment fields for all case types are not available online but are available at the courthouse. Party street address and name searches on criminal, traffic, and petty misdemeanor pre-conviction case records are not accessible, but are at the courthouse. Also missing are pending/filed cases, warrants, probation before conviction, and continue for diversion programs. A criminal/traffic/petty search excludes all Hennepin County and Ramsey County payable citations except: 1) those that result in a court appearance; and 2) Ramsey DNR payable citations.

Also, the Errors and Omissions insurance that private investigators maintain excludes online court research for background checks. You should tell your clients. Then they may appreciate why it’s cost-effective and prudent to pay you to go to the courthouse.

• KnowEm Username Check

  "Search over 350 popular social media networks to instantly secure your\nbrand across the social web."

• CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES TELEPHONE LIST

• CloudMade Maps

• Proposed Model Jury Instructions The Use of Electronic Technology to Conduct Research on or Communicate about a Case Prepared by the Judicial Conference Committee

• EveryScape - Local Search

• Google Search Operators - Google Guide

• California Highway Patrol Glossary of Commonly Used Abbreviations

• State and County Public Records links

  Download this pdf of links to county and State courts, Recorders, assessors and other public records (starting at page 24). Date of document update unknown.

• Rummaging in the Governments attic: Governmentattic.org

  governmentattic.org provides electronic copies of hundreds of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

• Lookup medical doctors

• California Background Clearance Listing - licensed care facility workers

  "California Background Clearance Listing California background clearances only - Individuals on this list have no felony or misdemeanor convictions reported by the California Department of Justice. However, the individual may have been arrested with no criminal conviction, convicted of a minor traffic offense or adjudicated as a juvenile."

• MaxMind - GeoIP | IP Address Locator Demo

  "find countries and cities, enter IP addresses/hostnames"

• Licensure Verification Databases - By Jursidiction

  USA and Canada professional licensing verification databases.

• International White Pages | International Yellow Pages on AnyWho

• International Phone Books

• How to Request Military Service Records or Prove Military Service (DD Form 214, DD-214, DD214

  The DD-214 is a one page document that lists discharge data, where one entered service, military specialty and civilian related occupation, decorations, medals, badges, commendations, citations, and campaign ribbons, education and training completed, type of discharge or transfer to reserve (which happens if they served less than 4 years active REGULAR service.

• Contracts with the State of California

• Computer Crime & Intellectual Property, Dept. of Justice

• Federal and State government transparency

  Government budget accountability projects.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Even if you don’t need to identify traffic citations for your subject, a citation database places your subject in a region on a specific date.

Monterey County, California has a traffic citation database separate from the court case traffic index that you can search by name and date of birth. Supply the driver license number to check the traffic ticket payment system for violations and the date when traffic school was completed.

Search by name with a date of birth at the San Mateo County site to locate active citations.

A jurisdiction’s traffic citation payment site may require a case docket number or a citation number and some government agencies contract with commercial payment services, which have varying field input requirements. The government agencies may specify that citation information can only be retrieved with a citation number. But Fresno State, for example, allows a search by license plate number.

Another commercial site has the option of finding a citation by vehicle plate and state.

Subscribe to links to research sources and new public records sites, delivered by RSS or viewed through your Twitter application at: http://twitter.com/PIbuzz.

Google Scholar is indexing the case law in all 50 states - Court of Appeals and Supreme Court - and the federal courts.

As with the other Google search engines, Google Scholar makes use of its own advanced search operators. Search by keywords, personal names, inclusive dates, and specify one or more states in a single search. Options on a single search are limited to 1) Search all legal opinions and journals; 2) Search only US federal court opinions or, 3) Search only court opinions from self-selected states.

Wondering which courts are included and the inclusive dates? Ask Google Scholar Help:

Which court opinions do you include?

Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read opinions for US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791 (please check back periodically for updates to coverage information). In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available. Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

View a list of search results with citations and a 2-line summary of text where some or all of the keywords appear. From here you can select to read an entire case or view case summaries that have cited the selected case.

My search query [(garbage OR trash) (curb OR curbside) +privacy], limited to California courts, 1970-2009 returned 33 cases.

Should an investigator or attorney “friend” a prosecution witness in order to find impeachment evidence? Are there legal or ethical bars to surreptitiously gathering data from social network profiles? Should the intent of the user have any bearing on the formulation of law related to access? These and more questions were stirred up in the mix of case studies presented at the (first, annual?) symposium, Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking, sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Law. Yeah, a long title but, hey, these folks are academics. And the case studies constituted just the first panel (”Problems Unique to Social Networking and the Law”) of an extraordinary assemblage of academic, government, activist, policy and practicing lawyers rounding out the 5-panel day.

Much of the discussion concerned access to profile content, - the difference between civil and criminal (where there’s the familiar prosecution/defense imbalance) cases - whether certain information should be private even if it can be viewed by unintended parties. For example, should employers be able to view deleted personal information? No one mentioned the issue of whether schools have a legal right to compel students to turn over their user names/passwords (See: “Area School Wants Access To Students’ Social Networking”). There may be instances when a legal requirement for disclosure would apply. Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Stanford Law, Center for Internet and Society, raised the question of whether evidence in the online sites could be used, say, in divorce cases, to support evidence gathered by other means. The Deputy General Counsel for Facebook took the position that user’s profile content is private, begging the audience to sue the company to settle issues of access. Yeah, the big brother of the moment IS laughing.

Bill Gallagher, a criminal defense attorney, noted that a circumvention of the Facebook corporate roadblock would be to get witnesses to bring to court copies of their social network profiles. But it’s impossible to get a judge to compel a witness to do so. He added that defense attorneys have to get a cooperative prosecutor to issue a subpoena in order to get access to a social network profile. Life is very different for government attorneys and law enforcement…

But this was an environment in which those who might be adversaries outside the ivory walls engaged in friendly disagreements, more in the form of musings than hard-line positions. Perhaps this was, in part, due to the unsettled nature of the law and the do’s, don’ts and can’ts of social networking.

Paul Ohm was on the panel, “The Law and Ethics of Covert or Deceptive Data-Gathering”, proposing that some content — photos and status updates — should be sealed from view, treated differently than other types of documentary evidence because it’s transient, akin to a passing comment over the water-cooler. Lauren Gelman inquired whether user profile content was different in kind from other types of memorializing due to the privacy restrictions that the account holder sets. She added that the online content has a long searchable life, which also gives it a unique nature. And who decides what is private? As Paul Ohm rightly pointed out, commercial entities are the holders of that power.

Speakers on the panel, “Regulating Crime in the Cloud: Policing Unlawful Behavior on Social Networks”, discussed release of email, who should interpret the meaning of an online comment or image, weighting the probative value vs. the harm caused. A passing observation by Judge Kurt Kumli, Santa Clara County California Superior Court, caught my attention. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) In a domestic violence matter, a defendant can “follow” the victim on her Facebook site without violating a protective order.

In the spirit of academic engagement (unlike government, that must be dragged, kicking and screaming), all of the conference presentations were recorded and will be available on the website.

In the meantime, take a look at this guide to social networking research that was prepared by the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic in response to a request from the Santa Clara Public Defender: Handbook on Conducting Research on Social-Networking Websites in California.

Cases, news reports, books, law journal articles and opinions are noted in the resources section of the website and the Case Studies are also posted. The mp3 files of all the panels, the audience comments and questions and the Keynote Address (by John Carlin, Chief of Staff and Senior Counsel to the Director of the F.B.I.) should be available this week.

UPDATE (10/30/09): The mp3 audio files are at the conference site.

Read Donna Seyle’s conference review, The Legal Dilemmas of Social Networking, Part 1

A review from the non-profit sector is here.

Facebook profiles — “info” and “wall” pages — are often viewable to others in the same network, providing historical and real-time intelligence for your investigations. All this can be done passively without a special request to “friend” them. I have a link (named, Adversary’s Social Network Profile - Admissible in Court) on my social bookmarking site to an article that discusses the admissibility in court of webpages and content from social network profiles.

Admissibility also concerns public records, publicly available personal information and violations of privacy. There are legal and ethical issues that arise in methods of information gathering. Some techniques may be acceptable in an investigation to gather background or investigate fraud that should not be used in litigation. That said, there are ways to passively view content that takes advantage of technical glitches in applications and of a users privacy settings. One of the people I follow on Twitter (see my sites at twitter.com/PIbuzz and twitter.com/ThompsonPI) is twitter.com/BrettTrout. He provides a Google query to obtain private notes that Facebook participants have added to their sites. I have a link to this at my Twitter pages. If you want to search for notes on a particular user’s profile, just insert her name in the search bar as part of your query.

California legislation that the California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI) is tracking:

Protection of Consumers through Continuing Education
SB 202 [Harman]

Prohibitions against Use of Credit Report Information
AB 943 [Mendoza]

Meal and Rest Periods & Licensed Private Investigators
SB 287 [Calderon] and SB 380 [Dutton]

Flexible Work Schedules
AB 141 [Tran] and SB 187 [Benoit]

Expansion of Paid Sick Days
AB 1000 [Ma]

Fair Concealed Weapon Application Process
AB 357 [Knight]

Timely Testing of DNA Specimens
SB 439 [Wyland]

Insured’s Access to Accident Reports
AB 470 [Niello]- Support

Peace Officer Identification
SB 169 [Benoit]

Restrictions on Technology
AB 255 [Anderson]

BSIS Posting of Accusations and Disciplinary Actions
SB 599 [Negrete McCleod]

Federal legislation that the National Council of Investigation & Security Services (NCISS) is tracking:

HR-2221 The “Data Accountability and Trust Act” by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL). A hearing was held earlier this spring. Rep. Rush has pledged to work with another subcommittee chairman on this and other issues relating to the Internet, leading to a vote this summer.

S-139 The “Data Breach Notification Act” by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA). The bill is pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) may introduced his own version of data breach legislation. He pledged earlier this year to make privacy legislation a priority.

HR-122 “Protecting the Privacy of Social Security Numbers Act of 2009″ by Rod Frelinghuysen (R-NJ). We met with the Congressman’s staff to urge that an exemption be provided to permit investigators access to critical information.

S-141 “Protecting the Privacy of Social Security Numbers Act” by Senator Feinstein. Although the bill includes a helpful exception for “business to business” transactions, NCISS is urging a more specific exemption.

HR-1529 “Second Chance for Ex-Offenders Act” by Rep Charles Rangel (D-NY). The bill would provide for expungement of federal criminal records.

S-30 “Truth in Caller ID Act” The bill prohibits “spoofing” with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value”.

HR-1409/S560, the “Employee Free Choice Act” This major labor reform would deny employers the right to obtain a secret ballot vote for organizing efforts and would impose binding arbitration in when no first agreement can be reached. It is labor’s top priority and the fight is led by the SEIU which has attempted to organize guard companies.

Government agencies won’t put public records on the Internet but the former Santa Bernardino County Assessor found a technological runaround to making his emails a public record.

A private investigator and the former supervisor of the Worthless Check Division in the St.Tammany (Louisiana) District Attorney’s Office were sentenced to three years’ probation for buying and selling criminal information from the National Crime Information Center database. The DA employee got the heavier sentence — she also lost her job.

Nebraska Supreme Court ruling: Burial records from a state run cemetery are a public record. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) claimed that the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applied because the cemetery was for residents at a former psychiatric hospital. But the court noted that HIPAA allows for the disclosure of protected health information when required by state law, and that Nebraska’s public records laws trumped HIPAA because these are death records, which are open records. Reported by RCFP.

Texas media, private investigators and genealogists are opposing the efforts of the Texas legislature to exempt the dates of birth of government employees from disclosure as a public record. The media has uncovered misdeeds by employees of the Texas Youth Commission — matching dates of birth with employee names — involving abuse of people and the public trust. Shielding dates of birth in public records does not protect the public from identity theft, as legislatures claim when attempting to carve out more public record exemptions.

Next week the U. S. District Court of California will issue the sentence for Lori Drew, the MySpace “cyberbully” who was convicted of violating the MySpace terms of service when she created a false profile. [See my article, Think Twice Before Going Undercover.] In that piece I talk about some of the considerations for the investigator who is tempted to fabricate an identity on a social networking site in order to gain access to a user’s otherwise private profile.

Here’s a legal issue to mull over. Perhaps this applies in other states, but in California, in criminal cases, the criminal defense investigator or prosecution investigator can’t interview a potential witness without first “clearly identifying himself or herself.” This is found in California Penal Code 1054.8:

1054.8. (a) No prosecuting attorney, attorney for the defendant, or investigator for either the prosecution or the defendant shall interview, question, or speak to a victim or witness whose name has been disclosed by the opposing party pursuant to Section 1054.1 or 1054.3 without first clearly identifying himself or herself, identifying the full name of the agency by whom he or she is employed, and identifying whether he or she represents, or has been retained by, the prosecution or the defendant. If the interview takes place in person, the party shall also show the victim or witness a business card, official badge, or other form of official identification before commencing the interview or questioning.
(b) Upon a showing that a person has failed to comply with this section, a court may issue any order authorized by Section 1054.5.

A violation could lead to the exclusion of the evidence obtained from that interview. Isn’t the investigator attempting to “interview, question, or speak” to a witness when the investigator accesses the witness’s non-public social network profile? The private profile requires the participants be accepted as “friends” and is a mouthpiece for the account holder to speak to her selected audience. The investigator who disguises his identity to pry open that witness’s cyber door could risk the exclusion of any evidence gathered through that pretext, as well as picking up a misdemeanor.